TCF research proposal on climate change

As an establishment with a growing reputation for its social scientific research, Though Cowards Flinch (TCF) has decided to approach the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with a view to the funding of a major inter-disciplinary research project into the socio-political and psychological aspects of the climate change debate.

Letters of support (and offers of matched funding) for our application are welcome. Here, as an aid to the writing of your support letter, is our own letter to the Chief Executive of the ESRC which summarises our proposed research.

Dear Chief Executive

We do not know much about climate change. How would we? We’re social scientists, not real scientists with test tubes and a white coat (pictured).

However, we do have a big multi-disciplinary social science project we’d like you to give us a lot of money to do, and which we think will be helpful in further in knowledge about why a lot of people talk utter bollocks about climate change, while some otherpeople talk comparative sense.

The research can be divided into two separate parts: statistical analysis and psychological assessment.

Statistical research

We will create a massive dataset in SPSS to examine the extent to which scepticism about climate change expressed by some ‘bloggers’ and internet-based journalists has a statistically positive correlation to a range of other belief patterns.

Further, through a range of complex regression analysis techniques we will assess whether any or all of these other belief patterns have a causal relationship with these bloggers’/journalists’ scepticism about climate change.

These beliefs, expressed as hypothesised independent variables, will be finalised at the pilot stages of the research, but are likely to include the belief that:

a) we are all taxed too much;

b) poor people are generally to blame for things because they are feckless;

This aspect of the research will involve in-depth interviews with bloggers/journalists who are climate change sceptics. The main purpose of the interviews will be to examine the extent to which their view that scientists only use/reveal data which supports their existing theory of man-made climate change, is in fact a case of psychological transference, whereby they impute to the scientific community their own characteristic behaviour, of which they are secretly deeply ashamed, of making wild generalisations based on selectively chosen data.